Robert Stein (1950)

Robert Stein (1972)

Robert Stein (2000s)

About Me

editor, publisher, media critic and journalism teacher,
is a former Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, and author of “Media Power: Who Is Shaping Your Picture of the World?” Before the war in Iraq, he wrote in The New York Times: “I see a generation gap in the debate over going to war in Iraq. Those of us who fought in World War II know there was no instant or easy glory in being part of 'The Greatest Generation,' just as we knew in the 1990s that stock-market booms don’t last forever.
We don’t have all the answers, but we want to spare our children and grandchildren from being slaughtered by politicians with a video-game mentality."
This is not meant to extol geezer wisdom but suggest that, even in our age of 24/7 hot flashes, something can be said for perspective.
The Web is a wide space for spreading news, but it can also be a deep well of collective memory to help us understand today’s world. In olden days, tribes kept village elders around to remind them with which foot to begin the ritual dance. Start the music.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Cockeyed Class Warfare

Tea-party politicians are accomplishing what Communists never could--dividing Americans by economic conflict--but in an upside-down way that Karl Marx never would have predicted.

Instead of masses revolting against the rich, it's the Far Right trying to turn back the clock by crushing organized labor.

Even as a Gallup poll shows 61 percent of the public favor bargaining rights for workers, new Statehouse Zealots, as ideological as American Communists ever were but even less realistic, persist in us-vs.-them efforts to take away union rights.

The sad irony in all this is revival of a cockeyed version of class warfare that never took root in an egalitarian U.S. For decades, unions have been losing power in the wake of post-World War II prosperity, the shift from a Rust Belt to a service economy and the overreaching and corruption of labor leaders from Jimmy Hoffa on.

Wisconsin's Scott Walker persists in his role as a hate-labor Lenin, but as he leads the charge, he might want to glance backward and find that some GOP governors are hanging back and trying to find reasonable ways of scaling down employee benefits without challenging the right of unions to exist.

"Some public sector unions have contracts and benefits that are too rich for these times," says a New York Timeseditorial, "but even when they have made concessions, Republican officials have kept up the attack. The Republicans’ claim to be acting on behalf of taxpayers is not believable...

"The game is up when unionized state workers demonstrate a sense of shared sacrifice but Republican lawmakers won’t even allow them a seat at the table. For unions and Democrats in the Midwest, this is an existential struggle, and it is one worth waging."

In the 1950's, a prospering country was in the grip of anti-Communist fever playing on anxiety that a rising middle class could lose what they have to Un-American subversion. Now, in a time that is far from prosperous, divisive figures are back to play on the same fears but from a different direction that Joe McCarthy et al exploited back then.